A Talmudic-Analytical Look at Miggo: Between the Laws of Pleading and Procedural Law – Rabbi Michael Avraham

[Speaker A] And I dedicated today’s lecture to the family in Montreal.

[Speaker B] And yesterday’s too, to friends.

[Speaker C] You defended the gaming group.

[Speaker B] Thank you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It reminds me of a story about Feynman. Once, two yeshiva students came to him to tell him some story — “Surely You’re Joking,” you know, he has those mythological books. So two yeshiva students came to ask him something, and he was very happy: finally the primitives are coming to hear a bit of science. They asked him, tell us, is electricity fire? Is electricity fire? He said, I don’t understand — what does that mean, is electricity fire? They said, because in the laws of the Sabbath we need to know whether turning on electricity is involved. He said, I thought you wanted to hear science — you’re just coming for your Jewish law. So he threw them down the stairs. Exactly.

[Speaker B] So in your case it’s Torah, and this is game theory.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I just wanted to say it so he’d be pleased. Okay, Phil, chairman, come on friends,

[Speaker A] Yes, one, two, three, four, yes, all the CEOs are here, we can begin. Just briefly review what we did last week too.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I’ll briefly summarize last time. We have quite a bit to do today. I distinguished between procedural order and the laws of evidence. In general, procedural order determines how the whole business is conducted, while the laws of evidence are about evidence — what counts as evidence, what the force of each kind of evidence is, and so on. For example, a possessor — someone who is being sued and is holding the money or the property — has an advantage because the burden of proof falls on the other side. On its face, that’s a principle of procedure. It’s not evidence that it’s yours; I explained that too — it’s conditional probability, but it’s not really evidence. But it does place the burden of proof on the other side, and therefore in terms of procedure, who has to open his mouth first? The other person, if I’m the possessor. So possession is an example of a principle that belongs to procedural order, not to the laws of evidence. But it has evidentiary consequences in the sense that if nobody brings evidence, then if I’m the possessor — and that of course means you are the one who needs to bring evidence — if nobody brings evidence, I win. Even though I didn’t really bring proof in my favor, it has a quasi-evidentiary consequence. Okay? Procedural order has consequences too.

After that I moved on to the kinds of evidence we know: witnesses, presumptive status, and so on. Migo is an unusual kind of evidence. Migo is basically when I make a weak claim but I could have made a better one, and then I say: believe me about the weaker claim, because if you thought I were lying, I would have chosen the stronger claim — I would have lied with that. So apparently I’m making this claim because it’s true, not because I chose to lie with it. For example, if I say to someone — a person claims that I owe him money, a hundred shekels — and I say to him: look, I only owe you fifty. Then, simply speaking, I have a migo. Why? I could have said: I don’t owe you anything. If I say I owe you fifty, I made a weaker claim, and clearly if I wanted to lie I would have lied better — why should I pay him fifty? I’d pay him nothing. That’s what’s called migo.

I said that this evidence of migo is unusual. It’s unusual in two senses. One is that migo, for some reason, doesn’t work to extract from someone in possession. It’s not considered strong enough evidence to extract from a possessor, and that probably relates to the second feature that makes migo unique, namely that migo is evidence about the speaker himself and not about the facts themselves. In other words, when I say, I owe you fifty, though I could have claimed I owe you nothing, that shows that I myself do not intend to lie. But if, for example, I say that I owe you fifty because I got confused or because I don’t remember, then the migo won’t help at all. Right? The migo only says that I’m not going to lie here intentionally. Therefore, for example, there are passages in the Talmud where migo won’t be relevant, because the issue isn’t the suspicion that you might be lying, but that you might be mistaken or confused. In such a situation, evidence of the kind called migo doesn’t help. Other evidence would help, because other evidence relates to the facts themselves — it shows what the truth is. Migo does not show what the truth is; it only shows that I’m not lying here. Okay? And that’s probably the reason why migo can’t extract money — it’s a somewhat weaker type of evidence. And note that because of this, we won’t be surprised, as we’ll see later today, when migo starts appearing not entirely on the plane of the laws of evidence. It begins to spill over toward procedural order. Not exactly — it’s not evidence about the facts themselves, but it’s still evidence. It’s evidence that I’m not lying. We’ll see later that this spillover continues.

At the end of the last session — I call it a lecture, old habits — at the end of the last session I spoke about partial admission. What I said before: partial admission, the rule is that if someone claims a hundred shekels from me and I say, I owe you twenty, fifty, seventy — part, okay? Part of what you claim. In that case, he won’t be able to extract the money from me, because I’m the possessor and he brought no proof. He just says I owe it — so what if he says it? Bring proof. I’m the possessor. But that claim arouses some kind of suspicion. Because if you say fifty, maybe you’re really trying to evade him. It’s uncomfortable for you, you say here’s fifty and so on — you’re trying to brush him off somehow. That arouses suspicion, and therefore the Torah imposes an oath on someone who admits part of the claim. Okay? That’s the law of partial admission.

Now the Talmud, or the medieval authorities — depending on how one reads the Talmud — come and ask: why do we obligate one who admits part of the claim to swear? He has a migo, as I said earlier. After all, if he wanted to lie, he would have denied everything — he would have said, I owe you nothing. So that removes the suspicion that he is lying. And if so, why do I now need an oath from him as support for his claim? I have an alternative proof — the migo is alternative proof. And I ended by saying that the accepted answer to this, in Tosafot in Bava Metzia on page 3, is that this is called a migo involving brazenness. What does that mean? I’m making a weaker claim: I owe you fifty. I have a stronger alternative claim that I did not make: I owe you nothing. Okay? But the stronger claim involves insolence. It’s unpleasant — the person next to me did me a favor, lent me money, and I say to him: you liar, total liar, I don’t even know you, I owe you nothing. A person is not comfortable being brazen in front of his creditor. So true, even if I wanted to lie, there are still good reasons to think I would not have chosen that claim, even though it’s better and I would have gained everything. Yes, but maybe I didn’t choose it because it was uncomfortable. Okay? That basically knocks down the proof of migo. It means the whole argument is: if you think I’m a liar, explain to me why I didn’t make the better claim. What do you want, an explanation? I’ll give you one: because it was uncomfortable for you. So a migo involving brazenness is, in effect, not a migo. Right. And therefore, if someone says fifty, and he had a migo because he could have denied everything, we still obligate him to swear. The migo doesn’t exempt him from swearing. That’s where we got to. Now I’ll continue.

[Speaker B] I have a small comment. When later we try to think about how to model this, to create systems like this, what you described here is interesting. You came and said that what drives us at the beginning is some sort of a priori assumption. Say, in the case of presumption, that the one holding it — because of some a priori assumption that most people hold their own objects.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not because of that assumption. It’s because of the proper legal order. In fact, there is no proof in favor of the possessor. That’s what I said — it’s a kind of conditionality. Right, we don’t extract from him despite there being no proof in his favor. We don’t extract because legal logic says not to extract without evidence, not because he is right.

[Speaker B] No, but what brought it about initially — last week too you said something, some Bayesian remark.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the contrary, the Bayesian point undercuts that argument. The basic claim says: wait, most things are in the hands of their owners. Okay. That’s only apparently so. If you look at it in Bayesian terms, it’s not true. That’s the prior, but the posterior is not like that.

[Speaker B] You came and said that it’s not true because of that sort of clever move.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because for the subset of objects that are under dispute, there is no advantage to the one holding them.

[Speaker B] That’s your clever move saying, wait, it’s not true. But are you saying the principle arose from some incorrect assumption?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, and that’s why I claim it did not arise from there. It didn’t come from there. It’s a legal principle, not a principle of the laws of evidence.

[Speaker B] I’m trying — okay, I’m just trying to say what the bottom line is. If we can model this process as a process in which we have some distribution of beliefs about what really happened, and then through various processes, like this process of inquiry and extracting information, and here within the process itself, we basically change our belief about the world, and we come out of the process having reached a decision beyond doubt, we landed here or there — then formalizing the problem this way includes various techniques. You say this migo you showed us is basically a technique where I tried to operate relative to several principles. At first there was this principle that if I’m a liar in this way, then we sort of cleaned the person of lying, and then we added more, namely the oath, to lower the probability even more. And now you added another principle altogether that works on a social value — whether I want to embarrass him or don’t want to embarrass him. In the end, he doesn’t want to.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, I have an explanation for why he doesn’t make that claim — because he simply doesn’t want to embarrass.

[Speaker B] I’m saying that trying to distill and format these things is important, because afterward one can create a procedure.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In this particular area of procedural order, there’s room to think in terms of this sort of modeling. But it would be modeling for a very specific area in Jewish law, so one has to think how much it’s worth investing in, because in principle you could do this kind of modeling for every area of Jewish law.

[Speaker E] Could it still be the case in what we’re discussing that there really is a plausible claim that the natural state is that things are in fact held by the one holding them — that they are basically in their natural place with the one who possesses them? The argument that this is conditional and so on obviously has significance, but it doesn’t completely cancel out that view.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that too can be included in the model. It’s not absolute, and that’s fine. But in this particular field there definitely is room for an orderly model of the kind you described — but again, it’s a fairly narrow area of Jewish law. So one has to think how much to invest in it, and fine. In any event, for our purposes, the commentators go on to explain or demonstrate that it’s not correct to say that a migo involving brazenness simply nullifies the whole thing. Contrary to what we assumed until now — we basically said that if the alternative claim is a claim of insolence, or just one that it’s uncomfortable to make, then you have no migo. You have no evidence. Not true. We have examples elsewhere in the Talmud where we see that even a migo involving brazenness produces results — that is, it does work.

One example is a passage in Ketubot. By the way, notice how scattered this is. This is a good illustration that an analytical topic of this kind is not located in one place in the Talmud. The passage I started with was Bava Metzia 3; here we’re in Ketubot at the beginning of chapter 2; there’s a passage in Bava Batra and several others. And each one is in a completely different place. In some of them the term migo is not even mentioned. Now, in chapter 2 of Ketubot it says: someone comes and says to another person — a person is holding a field, and he says, this field belonged to your father, and I bought it from him. You don’t know, but I bought it from him. Fine? And the other one claims: what do you mean? It belonged to my father, give it back — it’s mine, I inherited it. And I say: no, no, true, it belonged to your father, and I bought it. Now I have a migo, because I could have said: it never belonged to your father at all, you’re making things up. And since I’m the one sitting on the land, the burden of proof is basically on you — I’m not getting into all the nuances, but broadly that’s so. So here he has a migo and he is believed. Several commentators say that the migo there is also a migo involving brazenness. Why? Because the person knows the field belonged to his father, and you come and brazenly say to him: you’re a liar, it was never your father’s at all. Fine? So when I say: look, I say it was your father’s and I bought it, I had an alternative of denying it entirely and saying it was never your father’s in the first place. That’s an alternative involving insolence. After all, you know I’m not right — I’m lying to your face. So that is a migo involving brazenness, and there in the Talmud we see that a migo involving brazenness does help.

[Speaker E] With an oath?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, there’s no oath there. It’s something else. In our case the migo comes to exempt from an oath, but in general migo usually appears in monetary disputes. In that case it’s a discussion about land — who owns the land. Okay? And in land cases, in any event, one doesn’t swear.

[Speaker E] I think a migo involving brazenness means that since we’re not sure whether he has a reason to say, in essence, the weaker claim, the oath is what basically balances the story?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, and in partial admission, what I owe is not money — I owe an oath, because I’m the possessor, you can’t extract money from me. But an oath, yes. Now I have a migo that I’m trying to rely on in order to be exempt from swearing. In other places the migo serves as proof for the monetary ruling, not for an oath. Those are different laws. In this case, for example in Ketubot, the discussion is a monetary one: who owns the land? So I have a migo — but it’s a migo involving brazenness, the commentators say. And you told me a migo involving brazenness doesn’t work. Another example: there is a passage in Bava Batra on page 36. The Talmud says there that certain goats of Shasha entered my yard and ate, I don’t know, my fruit. Okay? Now I seize those goats and I say: look, they ate fruit worth a thousand shekels. Now I have no proof — we don’t know how much. But I could have taken those goats and said they were mine. So up to the value of the goats, I can be believed about how much fruit they ate, because I have a migo: I could have said the goats were mine in the first place. I admit the goats are yours, because I’m saying they ate my fruit, pay me. But I could have simply taken the goats. So I have a migo, and therefore up to the value of the goats I am believed.

Now why is my saying that the goats were mine — or not mine originally, but that I bought them or something like that — also a migo involving brazenness? Because I’m lying to your face and saying: these goats aren’t yours at all, they’re mine — taking your goats away from you. So again, there is a migo involving brazenness here, and we see that it helps. Again, the details matter less right now; I just want you to notice a few things. First, the term “a migo involving brazenness” doesn’t appear in the Talmud at all. The term migo does appear, of course. But a migo involving brazenness is a term introduced by the medieval authorities. It doesn’t appear in the Talmud at all. That already teaches us something.

[Speaker F] Obviously, in such a concept, interpretation is being used to solve some contradiction that was apparently there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. You see that there’s a migo and it doesn’t work, so apparently there’s a certain kind of migo called a migo involving brazenness that doesn’t work. Then we start dividing kinds of migo. And then we go back to the Talmud, look in various places at various migos that appear, and we see that some of them actually are migos involving brazenness. Then a further contradiction arises: does a migo involving brazenness work or not? In some places it seems to work, in others it seems not to. So this is a concept of the medieval authorities.

Now, parenthetically, I’ll say that there is a dispute among the medieval authorities about the status of a migo involving brazenness and of migo generally. I won’t get into the details, but just so you get a sense of the situation. Why is this important to me? Because since the concept of a migo involving brazenness doesn’t appear in the Talmud at all, and what usually appears in the Talmud are cases — not conceptualizations — there are cases and the ruling, more or less. The conceptual categories are formed by the medieval authorities, and even more so by the later authorities. So the Talmud is basically a framework that allows for various interpretive possibilities within it. And now I’ll show you three different approaches among the medieval authorities that are seemingly dealing with fundamentals — and still they say different things, because each one explains the Talmudic cases differently in a way that fits his own basic conception. So what are those basic conceptions?

[Speaker B] Again I’m returning to the modeling issue. We call it “a migo involving brazenness,” not “a goats migo,” even though it talks about goats, right? The whole institution of details. This is important. When we model these things, we’ll need to know how to generalize at the right level. In other words, the goat here was a much more general principle — you can apply it also to…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Goats, a field, produce — these are all just cases.

[Speaker B] You’re talking about acquisition, maybe there are elements and aspects, but it’s very important to generalize, because otherwise you can’t apply rules.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. More than that — that’s exactly what I said here: the generalizations and the rules are hardly in the Talmud; they are produced by commentators. They are anchored in Talmudic cases, but they are produced by commentators. And this is somewhat connected to the lectures I gave on introduction to Talmudic thinking, where I talked about the fact that the Talmud is very casuistic and the rules gradually form over the generations. We become more and more positivist over time. That’s true here too.

[Speaker B] What we just did one by one — our discussion was: we see realizations, cases from the world; ontology describes infinitely many possible worlds. In practice, I want to build an ontology, I look at the world, at my needs, and I start building a model of the world. Same thing here — you’re saying they tried to explain it to us, but how did they do it? Through cases. We want to extract the ontology, we want to understand the rules.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Like scientific work. You create a theory with theoretical entities that have no direct anchor in reality, but the cases in reality can be explained within that theoretical paradigm.

[Speaker B] A bit deductive. That is, so long as the theory doesn’t contradict.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] By the way, there can be all kinds of generalizations. Here, for example, we’re about to see three — three kinds of generalizations, all of which fit all the cases that appear in the Talmud. That’s the working assumption, at least. The medieval authorities generally don’t miss things — or at least we assume they don’t — and therefore there are explanations, and each of these will explain all the Talmudic cases, though within a different paradigm. So here is the first paradigm, that of the Ran.

[Speaker E] And still, when new cases arise there will be implications. Certainly. I mean, the fact that they all explain the past doesn’t mean they’ll all explain the same future cases.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. There are clear implications — different predictions for future cases, like competing theories in science. They all explain all the facts, otherwise they’d already be gone. They explain the existing facts, but they also have implications that we’ll test in the next experiment. Okay, so the Ran says that in monetary cases a migo involving brazenness helps, but to exempt from an oath it does not. That’s how he resolves the contradiction. He says: the cases I brought are monetary disputes, and there we see that a migo involving brazenness helps. What we asked regarding partial admission, where the issue is not money — the money remains with him — the issue is whether to exempt him from the oath. To exempt him from the oath, a migo involving brazenness does not help. But the Ran doesn’t explain why.

[Speaker B] And that takes me to the next stage.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning: if the Talmud presents cases, the medieval authorities present conceptual distinctions and theories, but usually only the later authorities present explanations.

[Speaker E] But you already answered that “why,” by the way, because you said we don’t know whether he’s lying or not, because under those circumstances it’s uncomfortable for him. No, brazenness — that’s what’s called a migo involving brazenness.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The moment that if…

[Speaker E] Brazenness in a monetary case does help?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s no proof from the fact that you didn’t make the stronger claim, right? Because I have an explanation for why you didn’t make the stronger claim. So why in monetary matters does it help? He says because it’s weaker. If it’s weaker, and yet it helps in money cases — that’s enough. And I remind you again that migo cannot extract money, meaning migo is generally an assisting tool for the party defending himself. Right? So basically the idea is that it’s easier to use migo in favor of the defendant because he’s already in possession — he only needs weak support. That seems to be the Ran’s view: he sees a migo involving brazenness as a weak migo. So it can help a possessor, but this still doesn’t really explain it. Because also in the oath case, the one who wants to exempt himself is in possession. After all, I’m in possession there too. I have a migo, you claim a hundred from me, I admit fifty, I want to be exempt regarding the additional fifty over which I remain in possession. And I want to be exempt without an oath. So why doesn’t it help there? There seems to be some distinction between oath and money, and the Ran doesn’t say why. What does it mean that it’s a weaker migo? It’s not a weaker migo — it’s not a migo at all. Why call it weaker? There’s a very general statement here. It’s very typical, and that’s why I’m dwelling on it, because this happens often — almost always. The medieval authorities have some intuition, they say something, they don’t conceptualize fully, they don’t justify, and all the analytical moves appear in the later authorities. And soon we’ll get to the analytical move that explains this. But that’s his claim: in monetary matters it helps; with an oath it does not. Very typical of the medieval authorities.

So that’s one approach, the Ran. A second approach is Ri Migash, the teacher of Maimonides’ father. Okay? Maimonides describes him in extravagant terms — he absolutely revered him, and it’s not easy to win that kind of admiration from Maimonides. So Ri Migash claims that no migo — neither a migo involving brazenness nor an ordinary migo — helps exempt from an oath. Nothing. He doesn’t say what about money, but simply from what we saw, in monetary cases a migo involving brazenness certainly does help. So presumably both kinds of migo help with money but do not help with oath, though he does not distinguish between the two kinds of migo. The Ran distinguished between them. He said a migo involving brazenness is weaker. Ri Migash distinguishes between money and oath, but not between the two kinds of migo. And the Rosh, that’s a third approach, holds that a migo involving brazenness helps both for money and for oath, and that there is no difference between them. So he says there is no difference — a migo involving brazenness is an ordinary migo, and it helps both in money and in oath.

Fine. So how does he explain partial admission? Fine, he has explanations; not important right now. But you see here three paradigms. Once we reach the conceptual level, we’ve basically divided the law into four sectors. We have exemption in money and discussion of oath, pardon me, exemption from oath and discussion of money. And we have ordinary migo and a migo involving brazenness. Okay? Now the question is: which migo works for this and not for that, one kind works here, the other there. Those are the game pieces. The playing pieces are these four tools. And now there are different approaches among the medieval authorities as to how to arrange the map. Once we’ve arranged the map, we need to go back to all the Talmudic passages — and there are dozens and dozens of cases — and sort all of them according to each of the paradigms. For each of the three paradigms here, I have to show why in this case the migo helps — ah, apparently he thinks this is not a migo involving brazenness, even though the other one thinks it is. Because otherwise it couldn’t be: if it were a migo involving brazenness, according to his view it shouldn’t work. Then you begin deciphering, and that’s work often done by the later authorities. They try to explain each of the medieval authorities in light of his own paradigm — first to explain all the cases according to each paradigm, and second to explain the paradigm itself. As I said before, none of the medieval authorities really explains anything. He just says: migo and a migo involving brazenness are the same, or money and oath are the same, or not the same. Why not? Why yes? What exactly? And in general, what remains of migo if it really is a migo involving brazenness? How could it still do any work at all? In oath? In money I don’t care. What remains of migo if it’s a migo involving brazenness? The whole argument of migo is that you have to explain why I didn’t make the stronger claim if I’m lying. I have an explanation. And if I have an explanation, then there is no migo. So what is a migo involving brazenness? A migo involving brazenness is not a migo. Nothing. So how can you tell me it helps here and not there? What exactly remains of the migo after the brazenness? That is really the question.

[Speaker F] Meaning, Rabbi, a methodological question: about the difference between the medieval and later authorities in this regard. Is the reason for what people recognize as over-analyticity on the side of the later authorities simply a different approach — I don’t know, that the medieval authorities held that you don’t need justification, just positions, as Nimrod said, or the conceptualization, and the rest doesn’t matter? Or do we say that they did say it, but they just didn’t write it down? That it was transmitted somehow?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A question I don’t know how to answer. It’s known that there’s a difference, and there were very interesting debates about it. I mentioned, I think in the introductory lecture, that Rabbi Chaim of Brisk builds a whole towering structure around Maimonides of the 12th century. Right? And then people say to him: listen, there’s no chance Maimonides even dreamed of this structure. Clearly he did not; you’re planting all sorts of ideas into him — an enormous edifice — and he doesn’t even hint at it. Then there’s a major debate over whether Rabbi Chaim thought that this nevertheless somehow stood behind Maimonides’ thought, even if he himself was not conscious of it — but in modern formulation, this is an authentic formulation, faithful to what was really in Maimonides’ mind — or not. But what do I care? I’m building my structure on the basis of Maimonides, so it’s my building, not his. But practically speaking, it’s a good building, right? So all is well. It’s a very interesting debate that can be discussed separately.

One thing is clear: part of it probably also has to do with authority. That is, the medieval authorities are seen as having a certain authority; they don’t need explanations. That’s what they say. They themselves didn’t see things that way, but we see them that way. And then the later authorities try to offer explanations, because clearly the medieval authorities were right — because that couldn’t possibly not be the case — that’s a basic assumption in yeshiva-style Talmud study. And once that’s your assumption, obviously you need to look for explanations. And when you start looking for explanations, then you need to create conceptual categories, you need analysis. You’ll soon see how we move into the realm of the later authorities and what they do to explain the medieval authorities.

[Speaker F] So…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Basically, we have two fundamental questions. I don’t want to explain all three approaches, but I will explain two questions from which it becomes pretty clear what one can do with the three approaches. There are two basic questions here that need explanation, and these are really what the later authorities have to face. One question is: what remains of a migo involving brazenness? The whole idea of migo seems to have collapsed. You tell me: why didn’t I make the stronger claim? A sign that I’m not lying. No — I didn’t make the stronger claim because I didn’t dare, because it was uncomfortable. Okay? So the whole idea of migo seems to fall. So even before asking whether it helps for money or oath — what is such a thing as a migo involving brazenness? A migo involving brazenness is not a migo. That’s it. What do you mean two kinds of migo, migo and a migo involving brazenness? No. There’s migo, and there’s no migo. Okay? That’s question one.

Question two: if so, and if there is such a migo, then what is the difference between it and ordinary migo? That is, if these are nevertheless two different things, then one has to explain why — what is the difference between them? Second, why is there a difference? We said there is migo and a migo involving brazenness, and there is also money versus oath. What is the difference between using migo with respect to money and using migo with respect to oath, according to those medieval authorities who think there is a difference? Not everyone agrees there is such a difference, but these are the two basic questions in this topic from which one can unfold and explain all the paradigms. But these are the two questions, and I want to focus on them for a moment.

Now I’ll start, first of all, on a somewhat telegraphic level. The later authorities claim that from these passages we see that a migo involving brazenness does some kind of work. What does that mean? It means that apparently there is something more in migo than this logical argument — “if I were lying, I would lie better” — which is called in the Talmud “why would I lie?” That’s the term there: “why would I lie this way when I could lie that way?” So I said, there is something else in migo. And we see that a bit like in science. The cases in the Talmud and its rulings are treated as facts. And on the basis of those facts, we build a theory to explain the facts. Okay? The assumption is that what the Talmud says is a fact within the Talmudic and halakhic field. And now we come to explain it. So first of all, the facts show us — like quantum theory — very surprising things, but these are the facts, this is what we measure. It doesn’t fit, it doesn’t make sense, but those are the facts. Now the question is what to do with that.

Okay? So some later authorities say — they call it “strength of claim” or “strength of credibility.” What does that mean? In a case of migo, I have the weaker claim, claim A, and I have the better claim I could have made, claim B. Claim B gives me force ten — I would win. Claim A gives me force three. Fine? They say I have “strength of claim.” What does that mean? The force of that claim transfers to this claim. In other words, whatever I could have achieved with the alternative claim, I can also achieve with this claim. Some kind of rule like that. No logic is explained yet, but some kind of rule like that. And then this is true even in a migo involving brazenness, because even there, had I made that claim, I would have had the power to win. True, it is uncomfortable to make it, but on the factual level, if I had made that claim, I could have won. And if there is a rule saying, “whatever I could have won with that claim, I can also win with the weaker one,” then that applies to a migo involving brazenness as well.

Okay? Which of course returns us to the question: fine, then why are there differences between a migo involving brazenness and ordinary migo? So we’re back to square one. It seems that migo has two things in it. There is also the logical consideration stated explicitly in the Talmud, that if I wanted to lie I would lie better, but — and this is already the conceptualization of the later authorities through the medieval authorities and beyond — there is apparently another component in migo, another aspect of migo besides the logical argument that if I wanted to lie, I would lie better. And it’s a somewhat unclear argument as to its nature, precisely this transfer of force from the stronger claim to the weaker claim. First of all, we see it in the facts. Now one has to think: what does that mean? How do we explain such a thing? Where does it come from? Why is it so? That’s another discussion.

Now here I want to focus a bit on a methodological point. Does all the force transfer, or only part of the force? If all the force — the force you have there transfers here — what does that mean?

[Speaker B] How does that work?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m getting there. First of all, this is what in philosophy of science is called a phenomenological theory — that is, I’m describing the facts for you, placing them within some theoretical framework, but I’m not yet explaining. In physics too, with black-body radiation, for example, it started with a phenomenological theory. There was a formula describing the emission curve by frequencies. Nobody understood why, until Einstein came and said there are really photons here, and that’s how quantum theory began. Okay? Quantum theory, which he later fought so much against. So here too there is a phenomenological stage: I’m simply describing the facts for you. The facts are that migo works even where there is no “why would I lie?” even where the logical consideration is absent. Fine — then there is some sort of strength of claim here, some kind of power given to this claim. I see it. How to explain it, what to do with it — excellent question, we’ll touch on it in just a moment.

But perhaps one more point. Some later authorities really say: this thing is sorcery. What does it mean? What I have power over there just gets transferred here? There’s no logic in that, and you’re not offering me any logic, so what do you want from me? I met Rabbi Mendy today when he came to visit here, and he told me — he’s a friend of Erez — he said: well, you surely don’t accept this notion of migo as strength of claim; you’re a rationalist. I told him no. As a rationalist, I do accept migo as strength of claim, and I want to explain why. There’s a difference between being rational and being a rationalist.

I’ll explain it through a story — I told him this story too. In our yeshiva there was someone who had jaundice for half a year. Today he’s a well-known figure. He didn’t come back to the yeshiva for something like half a year. At some point a mutual friend had been with him and told me that some young Haredi witch came there, put pigeons on his navel, the pigeons died, and a few days later the guy came back to the yeshiva happy and cheerful. I go home to my parents — my parents immigrated from Hungary, they don’t know from yeshiva or anything, for them everything is dark. I come home and tell them: listen, this happened with pigeons, they died, and he came back. They say: they’re messing with your mind in that yeshiva, those dark people — where’s scientific understanding, where’s rational thought? So I told them: look, being rational does not mean rejecting anything that doesn’t fit into your existing paradigm. That’s not called being rational — that’s being a rationalist. A rationalist is someone who says: if it doesn’t fit my existing conceptions, I don’t accept it. Okay? A rational person is someone who says: if I have good evidence for the matter — see quantum theory — if I have good evidence for it, then apparently something in my present paradigm is wrong.

And here the rational person differs from the mystic. The mystic says: ah, then apparently there are things beyond our understanding, and I don’t know, demons and angels are doing it. The rational person says: okay, let’s now try to think of a new explanation, let’s change paradigms. Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts — that’s exactly the process. I replace the paradigm in order to bring this thing too into my rational framework, but I don’t reject something that doesn’t fit just because I’m convinced it’s true. And it may be that it isn’t true. This is a very big question: how to deal with dilemmas of this kind. Every paradox is like this.

Take Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Today the solution is simple, but suppose we place ourselves in Zeno’s time. Okay? He suddenly arrives at Achilles and the tortoise. So what’s the conclusion? That there is no motion in the world. He denies motion entirely. But there is motion. Say I can’t point exactly to the bug in your computation or your argument — I can’t — but I tell you I do not accept your conclusion. And in every paradox there’s always this tension between an argument where you can’t quite identify the problem, and a conclusion that is obviously false. So what do you prefer? On the one hand, if I stick with my position and the conclusion really is wrong, then I’m just being conservative. And if there’s a good argument in favor of something I disagree with, I need to open myself to the possibility that I’m wrong. On the other hand, it’s obvious we are not going to give up the concept of motion because of some mathematical trick by Zeno, right? Clearly that’s not correct. I’m not smart enough to put my finger on the precise problem in the calculation, but clearly there is a problem in the calculation.

And there’s no neat solution to this — this tension that always arises around paradoxes always places before us two options. And I’ve written quite a bit about this on my website. I’ve tried to show people that they always ignore one of the two. Many times people say: I have a logical argument that leads to a conclusion; that proves the conclusion is correct — what else could it be? No. It could be that there is a problem in your argument. You have not discovered the correct argument. The logical argument looks valid, but perhaps it only looks valid and really is not. Okay? Or its premises aren’t true, whatever. So there is a tension here.

On the one hand, this migo — to return to migo — is very hard to understand. What do you mean, a migo involving brazenness? There is no logic of “why would I lie?” here. That logic has collapsed. On the other hand, the facts in the Talmud say yes: a migo involving brazenness also does work. It does something. Now there are two possibilities. One is to be a rationalist and say: no way, this is a mistake — I don’t know, maybe a scribal error, some corruption in the Talmudic text, something else. I refuse to accept it; there’s no such thing, it’s not logical. That’s Rabbi Breisch’s position, for example, and also what Rabbi Mendy said to me today — that he expected me to do that. I told him no, I’m not a rationalist, I’m rational. Meaning: these are the facts. Now we need to try to explain them.

[Speaker F] What in modeling terms would be called an open world versus a closed world — either you reject anything that doesn’t fit your constraints, the so-called scientific approach, or you explain it, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. That’s how one progresses; that’s how paradigms are broken when science advances. If we weren’t willing to break paradigms, science would still be in the state of Adam. Because we would never accept any fact that doesn’t fit the current paradigm. So that’s certainly not a fruitful thesis, nor a fruitful methodology.

In any event, the point is that to me, or to the later authorities who go in this direction, the facts in the Talmud are very clear. A migo involving brazenness does work. Now there are two paths one can take. One can deny it, be a rationalist and say: nonsense, I don’t know, search for other solutions — or fail to find them. There is another approach that says: well, there is some principle here beyond our understanding, but the Holy One, blessed be He, is so great, and we don’t understand the Torah and Jewish law. That too is very problematic. Why? Because even if there are things in Torah and Jewish law that are not understood — and there are quite a few — you need a source for those things. If there’s a verse where the Holy One, blessed be He, tells us so, okay, then I don’t understand but He said it. But here there is no source at all. These are things the sages arrived at by reasoning. There is no verse. So that option too does not exist. The only option left is to try to break the paradigm and ask whether maybe there is some kind of logic here that we didn’t initially see. Then I keep the facts I found and change the paradigm — and that is essentially what most of the later authorities do.

Okay? In Brisk, for example, the basic ethos — and I think I spoke about this in the introductory lecture — is that we ask only the what and not the why. This is, in my view, a kind of humility, though excessive humility: I only want to describe what happens, only phenomenology. I do not presume to understand why, or whether it is logical or not. And that reflects the second approach I mentioned before. But I say again: without verses and such, people thought about this and reached that conclusion; apparently they had some sort of logic. It didn’t come from heaven. So the question now is what that logic could be.

One more point that takes us a step further. I remind you again that migo stood somewhere in between procedural order and the laws of evidence, and now you see that here we’re crossing that line. Because the ordinary argument of migo — that if I wanted to lie, I would have told a better lie — is an evidentiary argument. Very sensible: it supports the conclusion that I am probably telling the truth. Okay? That’s evidence, and belongs to the laws of evidence. The argument that emerges here — even before I explain it, but if I want first to characterize it — belongs more to procedural order than to the laws of evidence. Because what this migo is really saying is: we need to determine who has the status of possessor, or who wins here without evidence. Okay? And when I determine who wins here without evidence, that is already very close to a procedural concept like possession. Right? We already saw that a possessor wins not because there is evidence in his favor. Procedural order determines that he wins; this is not the laws of evidence. So that already gives us a direction about where to look for the explanation. We should not be looking for it on the evidentiary plane, because apparently there is no evidence here — the logical consideration collapsed. But there is some other consideration here, perhaps more connected to possession, to procedure, to that side. And I said that migo, by its very nature, lies somewhere between these two areas anyway.

Now among the later authorities there are two kinds of expressions for this strange process. One is called “strength of claim,” and the other “strength of credibility.” In the yeshiva world they’ll tell you these are synonyms. I think not. I think they are two ways of looking at the same conclusion, and they relate to the methodological point I mentioned earlier. When people say it is “strength of credibility,” they mean that I have some sort of evidence in my favor. But there is no logical evidence here. A scriptural decree? I don’t know exactly what this is. Like electricity, some transfer of power from here to there — that’s Rabbi Breisch’s phrase. So it’s some kind of electrical transfer; there’s no logic to it. Then it is “strength of credibility”: I am believed. As though I had brought evidence — but there is no evidence. And there is no verse that would explain why to treat this as evidence without logic. So in my opinion this is not a possible direction.

[Speaker E] Maybe it’s a kind of presumption that a person won’t act against his own interest.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You know, if I…

[Speaker E] If I could have used a stronger claim and gotten off entirely, and now I’m basically using the same factual basis, as it were — I concede the factual basis in principle, I’m just adding some further information on that basis — then maybe there is some logic from the side that allows me to use this transferred force from one side to the other, because there is a presumption that a person won’t harm himself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why not? He may harm himself because it’s uncomfortable for him to insist on his rights — or not to insist on them — to lie in order to get a better outcome. It’s uncomfortable. That too is a bonus, yes, in the utility function. In game theory there is a utility function. The utility function isn’t made up only of money; it also includes honor, embarrassment, reluctance to be insolent. All these are utilities that a person takes into account when forming a policy.

[Speaker E] So maybe that itself is a kind of utility that I don’t want to punish him for, and maybe there’s a sort of proportionality here, such that I am thereby encouraging it — because I know that if I don’t allow this, then the person will still be forced to use that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s connected to the ordinary migo I discussed in response to Nash last time, where I said migo doesn’t undermine itself, because the liar will in any case choose the claim he wants. I don’t want the truthful speaker to be forced to lie. But in this present migo, I’m saying there isn’t even the ordinary migo argument at all. Even before the question of how to reestablish the migo argument, here there is no migo argument at all. So that whole consideration doesn’t exist.

Now look, here the claim is really what the Kehillot Yaakov writes — that’s Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, the father of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky. He was a well-known Torah scholar in Bnei Brak, died in the 1980s, back when I still lived there. He wrote books called Kehillot Yaakov, wonderful books in my opinion. They are a great example of a very strange dichotomy among Haredi Torah scholars: on the one hand speaking utter nonsense in areas outside Talmud, and on the other, astonishing clarity and analytical ability when it comes to Talmud. When I read his books of Jewish thought, I find them dreadful. Anyway, for our purposes, he says this:

He says, basically, I want to remind you that a possessor wins on the basis of a claim even though there is no evidence in his favor. He makes a claim that it’s his, and he can win even though there is no evidence supporting him. Why is that? The idea is that what the possessor is really saying is this: look, you want the court to take the money from me and give it to you, right? Now in order for the court to act, you need to give it reasons. I don’t want the court to act. The money is with me; I stay with the money and go home. You want the court to act and take the money from me — bring evidence. In other words, you are the one who needs to move the court. I don’t want anything from them. So you see — this is a legal consideration, not an evidentiary one. It doesn’t prove I am right. It is a legal consideration that says: if nothing has happened, if I don’t know who is right, we won’t do anything. If there is no reason to act, we do not act. Right? That is what the court says.

This basically means that whoever has the power to prevail without the court has priority in procedural order. Right? If I don’t need the court — the money is with me and I can stay at home, nothing interests me, you can dance around my house and I won’t care — I don’t need the court. You need the court. I have the power to prevail without court. That gives me the advantage of possession. Right? It determines that if we do end up in court, procedural order says that you are the one who has to bring evidence. Who wins even without that? Says the Kehillot Yaakov: that is exactly what happens in migo.

What happens in migo? After all, I had an alternative claim with which I could have brushed you off completely. I wouldn’t need the court, wouldn’t need to bring evidence, wouldn’t need anything. I could make the claim that I don’t acknowledge your claim, I owe you nothing, and you go home. Right? True, it’s uncomfortable for me to make that claim; that’s not a logical consideration. But if you ask me whether I have the power to prevail without the court — obviously yes. I could have made that claim. Right?

[Speaker F] But you still need the court,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That claim is effective in court. The burden of proof is on you. Fine? So the claim is basically that migo…

[Speaker E] Instead of saying nothing of the sort ever happened, I could simply have remained silent, for example.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Even stronger. That’s the migo of “if he wanted, he could remain silent,” an even stronger migo. Yes. So the claim is basically that migo, beyond the evidentiary weight it has — that if I wanted to lie, I would have lied better — that is one aspect of migo, explicitly stated in the Talmud. But there is another aspect, which is the result of the whole process that the later authorities conceptualize: migo also turns me into a possessor. Because migo is basically saying: after all, I could have prevailed without the court, without bringing evidence, without anything. So first of all, I’m number one. You want to change something? You bring the evidence. In other words, all it does is establish that the burden of proof is on you.

Now what happens here in such a situation is basically a classic Brisker analysis into two laws. In the concept of migo, we suddenly distinguish two components, not one. One component is the logical component: had I wanted to lie, I would have lied better. Fine? The second component is connected to the laws of evidence; the second component is connected to procedural order. If I have a migo, the burden of proof is on you. I remind you once again that migo is always a tool of the defending party. In other words, he is in any case in a stronger position. So why does he need the migo at all? He can already win by virtue of being in possession. The answer is always that there is some challenge to his status, his claim somewhat undermines it, his possession is somewhat shaky, and so we need the migo. But what the migo does is simply restore him to the status of possessor. That’s all. Once you restore me to the status of possessor, we’re back to the beginning — now the burden of proof is on you, bring evidence, fine. If you don’t bring evidence, I win.

Now note: I win not because of the evidentiary force of migo. I win as a possessor. The migo is simply an indication that I am the possessor. Despite the objections to my possession, or the suspicions that perhaps I’m trying to brush him off when I partially admit and all the things because of which I am required to swear, I say no — the migo is really showing you the balance of power in court. If I simply open my mouth in a certain way, I win, and I owe nothing. True, it is uncomfortable to make the alternative claim; this does not mean there is some logical principle proving I’m not lying. It is only a matter of power relations. In other words, I could have prevailed by claim alone, without evidence. That is the privilege of a possessor. A possessor doesn’t need to bring evidence in order to win. He wins by claim alone. Okay? It is enough that he claims it’s his in order to win. That is my power. I can win by claim alone. If so, then I am the possessor and the burden of proof is on you.

[Speaker B] So there are basically, as you said, two systems. And in a place where there is no evidence, on both sides no evidence, then the decisive battle is who counts as being in possession, who has that status. Right. And that may not always be trivial; we may not always have an answer.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In cases where you need migo, it really isn’t trivial, and the migo helps me nevertheless show that I am the possessor. Because in all the cases where it is trivial, I don’t need migo. I win because I’m the possessor; he brought no evidence. But there are places where I need assistance. That’s why in partial admission I need an oath. Because true, I’m in possession, but various suspicions arise. So the migo helps me remain the possessor.

What’s elegant here — and this is a classic Brisker move — is that after we understand these two components in the concept of migo, we suddenly discover that ordinary migo contains both components, while a migo involving brazenness contains only one of them. Right? What explains the “why would I lie?” — the logical consideration — is absent, the evidentiary dimension is absent. But the procedural dimension is present even in a migo involving brazenness. After all, I do have an alternative claim with which I could have won by claim alone, without bringing evidence. So now it works like this: in a place where I need to bring evidence, a migo involving brazenness won’t help, because it has no evidentiary dimension. But in a place where all I need is to show that I am the possessor — not prove I’m right, but acquire the status of possessor — then even a migo involving brazenness will do the job.

And in all those places — the goats and the field in Ketubot and so on — those are places where all I need is to get back to being the possessor. Therefore a migo involving brazenness really does work there. What happens in partial admission? Why doesn’t a migo involving brazenness help there? Because in partial admission, you claim a hundred from me and I admit fifty. I am in possession anyway. Right? I do not need the migo in order to be a possessor. Rather, there is some suspicion — maybe I’m evading, maybe I’m trying to satisfy him halfway and be done with it. So I say: I have a migo. And they tell me: fine, then swear. The money is not extracted from me, right? I didn’t lose the status of possession. It’s not enough to say: no, you’re not the possessor, pay the money. No — I’m still the possessor. You can’t extract the money from me. But the court wants some evidentiary support in order to rule in your favor.

Do you see what happens here? Evidentiary support. And a migo involving brazenness does not have the evidentiary dimension. So that is why a migo involving brazenness does not help someone who partially admits to be exempt from an oath. The point is not the difference between exemption from oath and money as such. Rather, when you want to be exempt from an oath, you need to bring something that functions as evidence in place of the oath. Ordinary migo may perhaps do that; a migo involving brazenness does not have the evidentiary dimension. So what have you brought in place of the oath? What are you trying to bring? You want to prove that you are the possessor? I know you are the possessor. Even though you are the possessor, I still want you to swear. If you have a good migo — not a migo involving brazenness — then that migo serves as alternative evidence in place of the oath you would otherwise give me. But a migo involving brazenness has only the dimension that makes you a possessor — and you are already a possessor anyway. So what does that help? You need evidence, and you have not brought evidence. Therefore there the migo does not help.

So this means that in a case where, say, evidence is brought against the possessor, then in principle we would extract from you, right? Even though you are in possession, because there is evidence against you. There you would need a full migo, if one is even available. Right? But in a place where your possession is challenged, yet if you can show that you could prevail by claim alone, then you can win even without evidence — there, even a migo involving brazenness can work.

And this analysis — once we understand the two components in migo, and the implication that there is suddenly a different kind of migo in which only one of the two components appears — solves the two basic problems with which I began. One problem was: what is the difference between ordinary migo and a migo involving brazenness, and if there is a difference, what remains of the latter? Answer: ordinary migo has both components; a migo involving brazenness has one. And from that we also get the answer to the second question: what is the difference between being exempt from an oath and prevailing in a monetary matter? To be exempt from an oath, you need to bring evidence in place of the oath. To hold on to the money, it is enough to become the possessor. So the two questions are solved together.

That often happens in analytic Talmudic study. Once you understand — once you analyze the concept and solve the first problem — very often you’ll see that this also solves the other problems you have. And that is essentially what happens here.

Now for our purposes, I just want to summarize: what does all this tell us? What have we seen here? We have in fact seen a very typical structure of an analytic lecture, in which, first, the topic itself is not found in one place in the Talmud; it is scattered in various places. A certain concept appears in the Talmud, but without overly detailed reasoning. There are general statements, but that’s the broad outline. Then the medieval authorities come and say: there are contradictions between Talmudic passages. Therefore we probably need to distinguish between two kinds of migo. They create some initial conceptualization, resolve contradictions, but usually they employ what in the yeshiva world is referred to somewhat dismissively as “householder reasoning” — this is a bit weaker, that is a bit stronger — without a defined analytical explanation of the sort we saw with the two components, where one appears here and only one appears there.

It’s weaker — we saw the Ran say that a migo involving brazenness is weaker, and therefore it helps for money but not for oath. That’s a very — what’s called — householder-type statement, a not-very-analytic statement of people who “don’t really know how to learn.” Among the medieval authorities, that’s very common. Of course, the apologetic assumption is that the medieval authorities were all perfectly analytic; they simply didn’t say it. It stood behind what they said, and the later authorities are the ones who reveal it. And after the later authorities reveal it, you suddenly see that new concepts are born: ordinary migo and a migo involving brazenness; distinctions are born between migo and a migo involving brazenness; oath and money — that’s already among the medieval authorities — but now suddenly it gets an explanation. It gets an explanation, and a theoretical paradigm is created among the later authorities within which the facts make sense.

And this process is always closed only by the later authorities; it is almost never closed by the medieval authorities. That’s very typical of what we saw here. Not always, but almost always — it’s very, very typical. This relationship between Talmud, medieval authorities, and later authorities is very typical. Especially the later authorities of the past hundred years — they are more analytical. The later authorities of the first three hundred years, from roughly the 16th through the 19th centuries, are later authorities somewhat closer to the thought-style of the medieval authorities: less analytical, less definitional, more logical than the medieval authorities but less analytical in terms of conceptual categories, concepts, and legal-style definitions. You find that more from the time of Rabbi Chaim of Brisk onward — perhaps from Ketzot HaChoshen — 19th, 20th, 21st centuries.

Okay, so that’s basically the point. And if I return to the question of rationalism versus irrationality, I think this explanation definitely holds water; it is not forced. It’s not mystical electricity. And I’m not willing to accept mysticism, certainly not when you don’t even have a source for it. Again, perhaps one needs to change paradigms, and then suddenly these things do appear reasonable.

[Speaker B] No, because basically the medieval authorities were doing abduction — you see contradictions, then you analyze them, and then you say: no, if I settle my model of the world, then I can arrive at a solution in Jewish law. Exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Like abduction in the formation of a scientific theory — it’s completely parallel. Completely parallel. The only difference is that here the facts are statements of the Talmud, perhaps of the medieval authorities; there the facts are observational facts in physics. But the logic and methodology are very similar.

[Speaker B] Yes, because it’s different, say, from philosophy. I’m not erasing anything. What was said is correct, and I can add things that will help me understand.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In philosophy it’s more problematic, because philosophy — well, one can discuss this, but in my opinion philosophy is not anchored in facts. Therefore you make one claim and he makes another, but often the considerations are a priori considerations. In other words, what you say makes sense, or what you say leads to a contradiction — that is not an empirical refutation. It’s not that I bring a fact opposed to your thesis and therefore your thesis collapses. That’s why there’s generally no knockout victory in philosophy. These are different interpretations this way and that, but there aren’t hard facts that topple a philosophical thesis. It almost never happens. Once there is a hard fact that topples a philosophical thesis, it wasn’t a philosophical thesis — it was a scientific thesis, because it stands the test of falsification.

[Speaker E] In the end, it’s basically a menu of norms. A method. That’s it, up to here. More power to you. More power to you, thank you very much.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe I’ll just add something, yes?

[Speaker E] I see, for example, that I’m imagining it on the board, but never mind. So you have, say, the Canpantonian method, which is a method for dividing the passages, and you have the method of Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, which is basically a kind of method for dividing the norms. So we can produce the menu on one side and then apply it to the other side.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Very interesting, by the way, to do that in this topic. Very interesting. Because in this topic you see that there are many, many situations: a migo suited to exempt from an oath, a migo suited to exempt from money, a migo involving brazenness suited to exempt from an oath, a migo involving brazenness suited to exempt from money, all kinds of combinations. There is a claim against you, there is no claim against you, but there is suspicion in your claim. All of that is Canpantonian. The Canpantonians would tell you…

[Speaker E] But the Canpantonian takes the passage and does that on the factual system of the passage. Exactly. And here you have the normative menu that gets created.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What I’ve said until now is the Canpantonian side. And now Rabbi Chaim of Brisk will come and propose a normative halakhic theory that will explain the Canpantonian divisions.

[Speaker E] Don’t forget who thought of it first. Just kidding, not me. I only chose what to adopt after you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The hem of your cloak.

[Speaker E] That’s from Erez Nachshon.

[Speaker B] That’s from Erez Nachshon. This context of the normative is from Fish.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Jewish law deals with norms, not facts; that’s why it’s called normative.